The present invention relates to a system for searching information stored electronically. In particular, though not exclusively, the present invention relates to a system for searching information found on the world wide web.
A number of Internet search engines are presently available which allow a user to retrieve information, such as web pages, images, news group postings and the like, based upon one or more user specified keywords. Perhaps the most widely known of these search engines is the Google search engine. The Google search engine includes a fixed designation interface wherein an inputted search term results in the production of a list of documents or “hits” which contain the search term. The Google ranking system typically orders the hits depending upon the number of times the search term occurs in a given document. It will be appreciated however that such a system leads to documents in different categories being listed next to one another. The Google search engine does permit a degree of tailoring of the search hits by using predefined fixed search criteria. These criteria can be selected either before or after a search term has been inputted. The predefined search criteria provided by the Google search engine include “Web”, “Images”, “Groups” and “Sews”, however these fixed criteria are often not sufficient to enable a user to tailor a search in a meaningful manner.